The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, September 23-29
The Body Beautiful (1991)
Directed by Ngozi Onwurah
The first two short films made by Onwurah (who was born in 1966) offered fictionalized treatments of her family history. Coffee Colored Children (1988) impressionistically presents two child actors playing the half-Nigerian, half-British filmmaker and her brother Simon as the siblings grow up in Newcastle ashamed of the dark color of their skin. In The Body Beautiful, her white mother Madge Onwurah appears as herself, with a willowy Sian Martin portraying the young Ngozi. The film recounts—through a combination of reenacted scenes and voiceover narration spoken by both women—how in her younger days the girl regarded her single parent from an uncomfortable distance due to Madge’s having had a mastectomy. It then renders how, with time, the beautiful model came to respect her mother as a person and even see her as a complete woman, while Madge awaited with disquiet and hope for her child to feel comfortable returning to her bosom. Aaron Cutler (Part of “And Still I Rise: The Short Films of Ngozi Onwurah,” September 25, 10pm; September 29, 7:30pm at the Spectacle Theater)
